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"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Lockheed Martin, best known for its military aircraft and other cutting edge airborne machinery, is switching gears in a big way. The company has signed on with Victorian Wave Partners Ltd. to engineer a 62.5 MW ocean power project off the coast of Australia, billed as the world’s largest wave energy project.

The new project will feature a little gizmo we’ve been following for several years now, the PowerBuoy® wave-powered electricity generator developed by a company called Ocean Power Technologies (OPT).

So, let’s see what these guys have been up to since we last checked in.

PowerBuoy wave energy generator courtesy of Ocean Power Technologies.

The World’s Largest Wave Energy Project – We Built This!

Victorian Wave Partners was formed by OPT’s special-purpose company, OPT Australasia Pty Ltd., to develop the project. Lockheed Martin will leverage its experience at the manufacturing end to get the PowerBuoy components into production and integrate the wave energy converters.

We first took note of OPT back in 2010, when its small scale PowerBuoy became the first ever grid-connected wave energy system in the US.

The hookup took place at a shared wave energy test bed developed by the US Navy in Kaneohe Bay at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, in Oahu, where wave energy experiments have been going on since 2003.

If you’re doing the math at home, yes, the test bed goes all the way back to the Bush Administration, partnering the US Navy with the Hawaii National Marine Renewable Energy Center.Scaling Up Wave Energy

The concept behind the PowerBuoy is relatively simple. The shell of the PowerBuoy is literally a buoy that bobs up and down on the waves. That produces a mechanical stroking motion, which is transferred to a converter called a “take-off unit,” which powers an on-board generator. Electricity from the generator is conveyed to shore by cable.

That’s all well and good but the next challenge is to scale up the mechanism into a useful size while maximizing efficiency, and developing a cost-effective manufacturing stream.

By 2012, the Navy was expanding and enhancing its wave energy facility, and OPT developed a utility-scale version of the device.

Aside from scaling up the design, one key efficiency improvement was the switch from a hydraulic drive take-off unit to a direct drive unit.

The device is also tunable on a wave-to-wave basis, meaning that it adjusts to squeeze the most electricity out of each individual wave.

For extra bonus points, the PowerBuoy only rises about 30 feet off the surface of the water, with the bulk of its guts resting below. That low height, relative to offshore wind turbines, could give wave energy an edge on site selection where aesthetic concerns come into play.

Although the Australia project is expected to be the world’s largest of its kind (according to OPT, there’s a potential for 100 MW), let’s note for the record that OPT also has been testing the Powebuoy off Scotland since 2011, and it is in the process of commissioning another one off the coast of Oregon.

As for Lockheed Martin, expect more of the unexpected from this aeronautics firm. As part of a move to rebrand itself as climate-focused, “smart energy” company, Lockheed Martin also recently partnered with Concord Blue Energy to commercialize that company’s high tech waste-to-energy process in global markets.

The two-century old dream of harnessing the power of the sea came closer to commercial reality after the European Investment Bank backed a Finnish company with ambitions to deploy machines that generate electricity in six countries.

AW-Energy Oy, which also has the support of the nation’s biggest utility, Fortum Oyj, said it expects its could sell as many as 300 megawatts of its WaveRollers in the coming years. The EIB on Wednesday invested 10 million euros ($11 million) in the company to spur the commercialization of the technology.

Power generated from ocean waves has captured scientific attention since at least 1799, when the first patents were filed in France. While scores of demonstration projects have tried harnessing the sea’s energy, the technology hasn’t yet caught on at a utility scale because of its expense and technical difficulty. AW-Energy says its machine using a hinged panel fixed to the seabed is ready for widespread use.“The tech is commercially mature,” Chief Executive Officer John Liljelund said in a phone interview from Brussels, adding that the machine is due to receive a safety certificate from Lloyd’s Register this month, increasing its “bankability.”

If it works at a big scale, wave power would generate huge amounts of electricity without producing greenhouse gases. In 2012, researchers at the German utility EON SE estimated2.1 terawatts of could be captured along global coastlines.

WaveRoller is one of several coastal-power technologies seeking a broader commercial footing. DCNS SA, the French warship maker, in 2013 agreed to collaborate with Ocean Thermal Energy Plc on generating power using differences in sea temperature. Sweden’s Seabased AB is selling a different near-shore technology based on floating buoys. Britain and France are working on tidal lagoons that generate power.

For now, the machines being installed are small. AW-Energy is about to start a 350-kilowatt unit off the Portuguese coast, near Peniche, which will form the basis of a 5.6 megawatt undersea power park using 16 WaveRollers, Liljelund said.

Its objective is to sell more than 50 units in the next four years. It has plans to install power generators anchored on the seabeds of six countries.

Under development for almost a quarter century, the WaveRoller was inspired by a Finnish professional diver, Rauno Koivusaari, after he observed in 1993 how the power of the sea effortlessly rocked the hulk of a wrecked ship back and forth.

Tidal Surge

AW-Energy’s WaveRoller harnesses the so-called surge behavior of waves as they flatten and strengthen when approaching the shoreline.

AW-Energy is based in 22 kilometers (14 miles) northeast of Helsinki in Vantaa, Finland. Its other projects in various stages of planning or execution are located in France, Ireland, Chile, Mexico and Asia, according to the CEO.

Fortum and DCNS SA in 2013 agreed to install a 1.5 megawatt demonstration WaveRoller off the Brittany coast. Last year the company signed an agreement with Mexican clean power developer Grupo Enal to develop a 10-megawatt wave energy project off the Pacific coast.

More specifically, Marine Power Systems believes that global wave resources could be worth an estimated 4,000 TWh annually — or, to look at it another way, total wave resources across the globe amount to around 80,000 TWh per year, but 4,000 TWh is economically exploitable. The world’s leading industry body, Ocean Energy Europe, has predicted that a total of 337 GW worth of marine power could be sourced by 2050, with a market value around £76 billion ($97 billion).

Obviously, these are long-term goals, but what is more immediate and immediately-possible is the role of wave power in Europe. The report highlights the fact that 45% of wave energy companies are currently based in the European Union (including the UK), and with the right financial and policy support over the coming decades, Europe could exploit an annual market in the range of €53 billion ($60 billion).

There is no doubt that humans in general, and those concentrated in cities in particular, are responsible for much of the massive demand for potable of water and energy. There is also agreement that this demand is, at present not healthy for the biosphere in general and humans in particular. There is too much waste, inefficient energy use, lack of renewable energy infrastructure, pollution from fossil fuels and inefficient water use as well.

In summary, there is a consensus among knowledgeable and observant people in the reality based community that our present trajectory in the above issues is unsustainable.

The solution requires the phasing out of all fossil fuels and nuclear fission power plants and replace them with Renewable energy. This energy needs to be harvested within 100 miles or less from the highest energy users on the planet, the large cities, in order to have lower transmission and infrastructure costs.

The energy must be baseload quality 24 hours a day with wind and solar to supplement demand spikes along with pumped water storage energy, fuel cell or battery storage technologies.

The renewable energy source that is best suited on a global scale because it is constant, powerful and close to the major cities is the energy from ocean currents.

Observe the two maps below.

World population concentration

Now let us overlay the Hydrosphere.

Please observe the result of the merging of the hydrosphere graphic and the population concentration graphic below:

The energy is renewable, does not disturb the biosphere or hydrosphere and can completely replace the polluting energy we now suffer from. The densely populated areas have this powerful source nearby.

Ocean currents have far more energy potential than ocean tides. The tides alone are estimated to have a potential tidal stream energy capacity of over 120GW globally. Using both plus wind and PV would make a 100% Renewable Energy transition to the 18TW the planet required feasible with technology we now have.

Just in the UK alone, the marine power resource is estimated to be more than 10GW, representing about 50% of Europe’s tidal energy capacity.

In the USA a project is now in the works to provide wind turbine power to the East Coast for up to 1.9 million households. When built out, the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone will stretch 350 miles off the coast from New Jersey to Virginia and will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines.

Now look at where those wind turbines will be and realize that undersea turbines can be placed close by and save on cabling the energy to the shore. Much more energy can be harvested 24 hours a day from the ocean current. Sharing energy transmission cables from wind and ocean current turbines will save millions of dollars and hasten the transition to 100% clean energy.

As the new, clean energy replaces dirty energy, full electrification of the economies to eliminate the internal combustion engine for power plants, vehicles and factories will clean the air in large cities.

With plenty of renewable energy to electrify the planet and eliminate the internal combustion engine pollution, the worldwide potable water problem can be solved anywhere on the planet that the relative humidity is above 23% (any place it is not a desert climate) by extracting water from the ambient air.

The waste water can, given all the ocean current energy, be processed for agricultural fertilizer (eliminating petrochemical fertilizers).

In this way, we will imitate the biosphere in turning our waste into a nutrient that benefits all life on earth, not just humans.

Professor Tsumoru Shintake of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology University thinks wind and solar power are wonderful things. But research in those areas is a crowded field. He wants to investigate other forms of renewable energy, like turbines driven by ocean currents and waves.

Being a nation of islands, Japan is keenly attuned to the problem of erosion. Nearly 30% of its coastline is protected from the ravages of the sea by tetrapods, man-made pyramids that help reduce the power of waves before they reach the shore. Professor Shintake and his team would like to redesign those wave-breaking devices to incorporate small turbines that generate electricity from the power of the flowing water.

“Using just 1% of the seashore of mainland Japan can [generate] about 10 gigawatts [of energy],which is equivalent to 10 nuclear power plants,” Professor Shintake explains. “That’s huge.” It is especially huge in Japan, where nuclear power has a somewhat mixed track record.